Where most postmodern poets are content to render dramatic instances of the mind satisfied in process, Duncan has grander ambitions. His aim is to reinterpret the aesthetics of presence in terms that can recover the contemporary significance of the Romance and hermetic imaginative traditions…. [Duncan] conceives myth as a [highly] abstract and philosophical venture. The mythic poet, he argues, cannot simply be open to the present; "he must reflect himself upon that which he is a reflection of." Thus the poet must take on the difficult task of making poetry of reflective thought and the emotions it can create. (pp. 150-51)

When critics notice [Duncan] at all, they comment on his weaknesses as a lyric poet, for his verse is often diffuse, boring, and without vitality in language or imagery. Moreover, like Olson, his work is often difficult and apparently remote from contemporary concerns because his mythic enterprise requires that he incorporate a good deal of abstruse learning into his work. Yet once one accepts him as a poet whose primary task is to reflect on what others express directly, one can, I think forgive some of the lyric weaknesses and learn to read him for his intellectual interest and for those moments when he develops those interests into intense lyrical passages. Duncan is at the least a very important influence on other poets like Creeley and Levertov and at best he rivals his stylistic master, Pound, in integrating historical and mythic meditations with lyrical exaltation.

Duncan is perhaps best approached by first trying to articulate his own central myth and the particularly contemporary twists that he gives to its traditional forms. "Passages," the title he has given to his attempt to rival Pound's open-ended epic, provides one key term whose multiple meanings can allow the reader to enter that myth. Passages is essentially a term referring to thresholds or motion between boundaries, and it nicely links a sense of the natural process of temporal flux with the power of language to gather and surpass pure duration. (p. 151)

Duncan's basic myth, then, is the traditional myth of the world as book of God…. Duncan, like the medieval and Renaissance poets who saw the world as a book, writes an essentially allegorical poetry, but it is an allegorical poetry with a modernist twist because the truth of the allegory depends on its incompleteness. Since God is not a Logos defining all the essential properties of being, but a force seeking to realize himself in evolution, Duncan's allegory keeps returning to its own failures, to the lacunae in the text, for it is only by encountering what is lost or not present that one can help gather together that divine Being which escapes man.

Duncan renders on a metaphysical level the central tension in the poetry of presence—that in the service of an immanent force it must continually de-create or break down the accepted codes men live by. Meaningful presence is never simply there without a creative act by a responding consciousness. In order to read the text of the world one must write the book of that world as the way of resurrecting its sacramental meanings. (pp. 151-52)

Once Duncan glimpsed ways of overcoming the various forms of alienation recorded in his earlier poetry, he turned first of all to the basic postmodern pursuit of presence, of "the faces of being" … emerging in a dynamic multiplicity…. Yet Duncan's sense of a creative cosmos depends at least as much on language—on the codes that preserve what man records of his reflections on the world—as it does on his perceptions of presence…. Duncan's poetry has two orientations that often conflict: he seeks at times to capture fresh perceptions of Being directly, but more often he is concerned with relationships among perceptions, with seeing how the forms man has given to his perceptions reveal the latent interconnections of cosmic design and illustrate man's place in it…. He tends to see the poem not as an end in itself or as a completed vision but as a reflection of larger synthesizing powers of the cosmos…. (pp. 152-54)

[For Duncan, the] poem is a unique reality, yet it is also one of the transformations possible in a code or structure that includes it. The poem, for example, uses archetypal images and echoes verbal structures that go deeply into the past; thus its particularity depends for its full significance on the other latent dimensions of the code that it figures forth. And as one poem figures others, every event in the universe is related analogically to others. Duncan returns to a medieval cosmology, and he roots that cosmology in scientific discoveries like that of DNA, which propose a single unifying force undergoing analogous transformations in every different creature that shares life…. Symboliste correspondances are no longer essentially psychological and transcendent but comprise a quality of mystery within what Duncan calls a natural "process of responses."… That process is the theme of "Roots and Branches."… Inner meanings, even the creative unifying force, become as rooted in the processes of things as things do in spirit. Duncan then has found a contemporary way to justify the analogical vision. Whatever spirit one wishes to find must be compatible with scientific law, and one of the poet's roles is to ground his vision in metaphoric extensions of those laws…. Modern science makes it possible for Duncan to propose that as nature is allegorical, allegory is natural…. (pp. 154-55)

"Roots and Branches," however, is too simple a rendition of natural allegory because it maintains a closed system of one-to-one correspondences. There are no absences, no room for indeterminancy or play, and no structure to explain suffering. The poem finally is not true enough to the many dimensions in which the world might be seen as a book…. Man is … continually faced with gaps in his knowledge and moments when the overall unity seems lost in a series of associations or reveries not controlled by the book as a whole. If, however, one is to intensify God's orders, one must learn to cultivate these gaps, to see what energies they make available not explicitly contained in the unity that was trusted, and finally to regather them into the controlled tensions of the overall structure. Duncan's allegorical poetry, like Augustine's paradoxical meditative style, must seek confusion and complexity if it is to re-create an order that matters and holds…. The poem for Duncan must have "something to do with keeping open and unfilled the urgencies of life,"… yet it must complement this fidelity to the hissing energy of what is with a sense of Law working to resolve the contradictions it creates. Duncan's structural model for his lyrics is the modern epic, a form that can only pretend to totality by refusing all imposed structures and continually regathering the complex particulars that alter the emerging structure. (pp. 155-56)

"The Dance" … provides in a fairly simple form the recurrent aspects of [Duncan's] style…. The dance is a typical metaphor with which to celebrate the analogical universe…. Duncan's poem [is unique, however,] in the disparate elements it tries to hold within his rhetorical play and in his elaborate sound patterning, which dramatizes at the most fundamental level how the numbers have entered the poem's feet. Duncan's content is diversified not only because of the range of materials he refers to, but, even more important, because of the multiple voices, times, and levels of diction and experience he tries to gather within his form. The poem itself enacts a dance of mind utilizing a variety of poetic techniques to at once extend diversity, encounter gaps between disparate modes of experience, and suggest an overall unity informing the variety the poem preserves. The ambiguous grammatical reference of the phrase "root, stem …," for example, manages both to extend the dance, flowers …, and human speech by defining their analogical base and to collapse all three into a single force. Puns operate the same way—extending meaning and then unifying the variety they create…. [As] the poem is threatened by a silence on the one hand, it reaches toward transcendence on the other. The Lady of Rime, who speaks in italics, is made manifest at the margin of the dance and the vision it and its associations inspire. This presence at the margin, inseparable from the poem's willingness to face the gaps and de-creations that complicate the efforts of the analogical consciousness, seems the ultimate goal that Duncan can only seek indirectly through his reflections. Both The Opening of the Field and Roots and Branches end with realization of this marginal presence. (pp. 157-58)

As one might expect of Duncan, the poem's struggle to encounter and overcome gaps in the analogical matrix is basic to his ontology as well as to his poetics. Two central ideas—about language and about God—ground the union he develops and lead to a series of meditations on traditional Christian and pagan myths that have always implicitly recognized the analogies between poetic and natural creation. One line from his poetry serves nicely as an epigraph for his entire enterprise: "Poetry … is of violence and obedience a delicate balancing."… Whatever its end, this process of balancing the violent and the obedient word mirrors on the level of poetic theory the larger synthesis Duncan is trying to realize between pagan, pre-Socratic monism and a Christian ethical and psychological framework. (pp. 158-59)

For Duncan, Christian and Greek mythology preserves a vision made explicit by [Alfred North] Whitehead. Catholicism, for example, intuited the multiple phases of God in the figure of the trinity—as eternal form, as act of knowing, and as love or desire attendant upon any full experience of knowledge—within the limits of a Platonic and Hebrew vocabulary that could actually express God only as static unity. (p. 160)

The Greek myth Duncan finds most clearly repeating [a Christian-like] inner drama of the "poetic opus" … is that of Eros and Psyche, a myth that serves as the core of "A Poem Beginning With a Line of Pindar," one of his best and most typical poems…. The poem opens with a conjunction of three levels of reality—a quotation from Pindar, an imaginative identification by the speaker with the dance Pindar celebrates, and a brief glimpse of Eros made possible by the participation in the dance. Duncan then extends these visions in order to identify himself with Psyche and to construct a sense of meaning and imaginative depth for his own desperate attempt to reach Eros and a more enduring light than that provided solely by Scientia. Here faith depends on poetry: the more fully Duncan can adapt the myth to his own experience, the more he can trust its structure as a ground of assurance that his own quest has significance and promises at least one psychic resolution.

The Eros myth has value precisely to the degree Duncan can identify with it in the very process of developing an allegory based upon it. And because the identification is successful, Duncan can justify correlating natural desires with archetypal spiritual experiences and can envision poetry as a far more general power, reaching down into nature and back into time, than is possible in any concept of poetry as merely self-expression. (p. 161)

Duncan's dance ends on a note very similar to the one on which it begins—in a statement of the necessity for faith that beneath the signs the poet uses there is a coherent set of signatures. That faith is especially important for Duncan because, despite his sharing all the postmodern immanentist values, he differs from his peers in one important respect. Perhaps aware that a vision as inclusive as [Gary] Snyder's tends to collapse man into the universal energies he participates in, Duncan tries to give a special place to distinctive human moral and psychological traits carried in these signatures. But to do that he must try to recover Western romance traditions and must make mythic claims not as easily captured in specific dramatic moments as the claims Snyder makes. The difference is essentially between deductive and inductive uses of mythic and metaphysical ideas…. One can read [Duncan's] ideas in the same provisional way one reads other postmoderns, but if one does, he ignores the ambition Duncan shares with the great modernists to make of abstract poetic thought the materials for speculative visions. He loses the quest to transcend particular dramatic situations and to meditate on the ontological and psychological grounds for the poetic imagination and the values it professes.

Sympathetically read, Duncan's work then has greater imaginative scope than that of his peers. By reflecting on what other poets are reflections of, he achieves a generality and abstractness that articulates the value schemes shared by most postmodern visions of Romanticism. He makes self-reflexive and systematic the analogical nature of [much of his poetry] …, and he defines the analogical process in a rich restatement of the Romantic dialectic between creative mind and creative nature. But his ambitiousness creates serious aesthetic problems, exacerbated by the fact that he is more deductive and allegorical in his use of myth than the great moderns and consequently exhibits little doubt or struggle. One cannot simply read Duncan dramatically; one must understand and work to share the beliefs before one can really participate in the poetry. In this skeptical age … readers find it difficult to pursue abstractions they see as hard to understand and impossible to trust—especially when Duncan's immediate surfaces are so thoroughly conceptual and remote from ordinary existential problems and needs.

Duncan's abstractness and the problematic nature of his imaginative faith makes it easy for one to understand how readily a poetics of presence based on analogy or nature as the book of God leads into skeptical and aestheticist models of presence. Romantic dreams of finding the mind reflected in nature are always dogged by the possibility of becoming solipsistic celebrations of mind as the only nature and the most immediate locus of presence. (pp. 162-63)

[Faith] is only necessary if one tries to accept literally Duncan's claims for an interchange between natural and imaginative processes. If, on the other hand, one treats his work as similar to Norman O. Brown's, whom he often echoes, one need only take it as articulating the life of the imagination and no problems arise. His treatments of Eros and Psyche are immediately accessible in ways that his claims for a natural order of energies and signatures informing poetic language are not. The former requires only that one see the myths as expressions of recurrent psychic struggles, while the latter depends on analogical readings of selected scientific discoveries and on accepting a specific theory of nature. Duncan, I might say, wants to claim as grounded in nature an imaginative vision that appeals primarily as a self-contained aesthetic structuring of recurrent psychic events. In trying to combine the allegorical book the mind writes with a set of signatures inscribed in nature, Duncan actually shows why it is so easy to insist on a radical difference between imaginative and natural orders. (pp. 163-64)